HIDDEN MASTERPIECES: The Monastery of Poblet

At the end of a winding road in the Prades mountains, inland from the ancient Spanish city of Tarragona, stands the Cistercian monastery of Poblet, a place that is hard to get to and equally difficult to leave behind. It was founded in the middle of the 12th century by monks imported from the Fontfroide monastery in France. As always with Cistercian monasteries, the monks had picked their site with a view to maintaining a balance between the spiritual and the useful. In the center of the main cloister bubbled a pure natural spring. The surrounding fields were and are fertile, and the blue and silver mountain peaks cupping the high valley lift the spirit as well. The Cistercians did full honor to the site with an architecture that was noble in scale, harmonious in proportion and austere in detail. Although partly in ruins, the place remains a serenely inspiring experience to the few tourists who reach it.

Seat &Refuge. History has also contributed to the quiet splendor of Poblet. Being fairly inaccessible, the region was the last Moorish stronghold in Catalonia. Don Ramon Bereguer IV, count of Barcelona, drove out the last Moors in 1149, immediately founded Poblet as a memorial and an example to the fierce mountaineers of the region. Within the next half century, Poblet became a geographical and spiritual fortress of the combined houses of Barcelona and Aragon, and the resting place of their heroes. A century later, Poblet was a focal point of Catalonia's losing war with Castile. Philip II, Hapsburg heir to the entire peninsula, built El Escorial, near Madrid, partly to overshadow the relatively provincial pantheon at Poblet. The venerable monastery fell from being a seat of kings to the function of being a place of refuge. In 1835 an anti-monastic revolution swept all Spain. Poblet's monks fled, leaving the monastery to live on in a sort of half existence as the hiding place of looters and thieves.

Forty full years passed before any guards were posted to protect what was left of the monastery. The monks returned at last, in 1940, found most of its greatest treasures, such as the tomb of Count Folch of Cardona's family with its 16th century bas-relief (opposite), had been mutilated. A superb object of contemplation even now, the relief symbolizes life after death through the story of Jonah and the whale. Jonah is shown spewed up from the whale's belly onto the life-strewn shore.

Unsung Milton. Life for the 50 Cistercians at Poblet last week was one of winter's cold, cold joys. In rooms where the temperature averaged about 40DEG F., they devoted almost all their labors to the printing of books in Latin, Castilian and Catalan. Their printing equipment was up to the minute, but the only stove stood glowing in the doorkeeper's lodge. To that lodge came now and again a flint-faced, intensely devout blacksmith from the neighboring hamlet of Espluga de Francoli.

He had helped to restore Poblet over the past two years, employing a craft knowledge inherited from Gothic times, which persists in Spain as nowhere else. Screens and iron chandeliers had come from Ramon Marti's hands. But it was with a crucifix for a Poblet chapel that Marti, a "mute, inglorious Milton" if there ever was one, had shown himself a son and proper heir of the early Gothic tradition at its most triumphant.

With precisely the same tools and materials he used to straighten plowshares and make fire irons for the local peasants, Marti had hammered out of glowing iron Christ in glory upon the cross, the cross concave, as if to concentrate its radiance upon the worshiper, flames issuing from the nailheads in the hands and feet.

For all its pomp and misery, Spain clearly is still a place of glory, stored in such hidden sites as Poblet and such hidden artists as the blacksmith Ramon Marti.

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